Infoblox DDI is an excellent alternative for Microsoft DHCP. It is a much more robust solution. It can also do DNS for your entire environment. However, if you are an AD environment, you will still need Microsoft DNS servers. The IPAM functionality is excellent for keeping track of your IP addresses.
If you already have SolarWinds Products, there's no other product that I have seen on the market that incorporates all network management and IPAM tools so seamlessly. No longer having to have several consoles open to manage DHCP, DNS, and Subnets saves so much time and makes the whole process much more manageable.
With IPAM automated address scanning, we can be confident that we are looking at an up-to-date, accurate snapshot of our network.
The built-in alerts are a great safety net. We know that even if we aren't paying close attention to our IP address space, IPAM is. If a range is nearly full, IPAM lets us know before it becomes a real problem.
IPAM's event logging gives us insight into any and all changes made by our network engineers.
The user experience is not as intuitive as other products. We have to be more restrictive around level 1 help desk access compared to NCM or NPM in SolarWinds.
Making and enforcing changes, not just monitoring, has been hit or miss in some instances.
We are heavily invested in SolarWinds. We currently own Network Performance Monitor, Netflow Traffic Analyzer, User Device Tracker, Server Application Monitor and Network Configuration Manager. We have NOC mode setup for deskside support for monitoring any down devices that may effect our network across the globe. This application gives us the information we need when we need it.
It's generally easy to navigate through all of the menus. It's also very powerful in that there are many options available for configuration, allowing one to take advantage of IP address management tools. This tool is definitely a leader in the space, and provided you have the budget, is a very good investment. The team that uses it will appreciate the tool.
Bring the interface into a more user friendly space.
Allow the user the ability to move root folders into other root folders. There are times when sites need to be combined into a new group and having to delete then re-add them is a huge pain. Make the popup screen for putting in information double the size so that you get everything in one window view rather than having to scroll.
We do not integrate IPAM into other systems other than the standard Orion integration. The performance is reasonable, however, we are running all the SolarWinds applications on a very large server.
I have not contacted customer support and therefore have no experience in this area. I know we have some issues with our VAR support at this time for Orion, but I don't know if the IPAM falls into the same support structure. Perhaps others in the organization may know more regarding the support area.
Infoblox DDI supports services across hybrid platforms and the capability to switch from appliances to VMs has added to the mobility of the applications. Setting up two grids(Internal and external) helps manage and segment the network in scopes of DNS and DHCP and apply firewall security policies over our external caching grid members.
BT Diamond IP required the company remote to make changes we constantly had to message support which in my opinion was not worth it. All research said SolarWinds IP Address Manager was the best by a wide margin. We had no issues with SolarWinds IP Address Manager, and we got a great price so after evaluating SolarWinds IP Address Manager we did not look at any more alternatives
We have not experienced any scalability issues with this product. However, SolarWinds needs to allow users to scale horizontally without any license restrictions. For example, we would like to separate Netflow and Orion onto different platforms but are unable to due to license restrictions.
